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"If you had started doing anything two weeks ago, by today you would have been two weeks better at it."~ John Mayer

Developer. Entrepreneur. Gamer. Friend. I've been labeled as all of these things, and there's one thing they have in common - Dedication. This site chronicles my journeys and projects as I hone my skills and and subscribe to "experiential learning." If you have any questions regarding anything on the site, feel free to shoot me a message on Stack Overflow, Twitter, or Angel List. I strive to be a friend to all and help wherever I can!

DEVELOPER

As a developer, I have worked on projects ranging from C++ Frogger using QT, to a full-scale simulation city using Java, to a full-stack delivery application in Objective-C with Parse as a back-end, to a secure P2P payments application using C, Swift, Objective-C, and Javascript. While my experience has largely steered toward mobile development front-end and back-end, I am currently studying Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in order to mix this with video gaming principles and apply it in various industries.

In my studies, I have focused my business degree on Entrepreneurship, and I have incorporated my technical background into a few ventures, past and current. In all things, I strive to maintain an entrepreneur's mindset of making the most of the current resources and focusing on results through an iterative process. I believe that these principles can greatly boost productivity and creativity both within the workplace and on one's own.

I love video games. They've been a hobby and a passion of mine throughout my life, and my interest in them has brought me to go beyond simply playing games, but studying them. I have worked as a Teacher's Assistant in both 3D Video Game Programming classes and Programming Game Engines classes where I have worked on building gameplay and networked games on top of Epic's Unreal 4 engine and also creating my own engine. I wholeheartedly believe that gaming principles can be applied within and outside of games themselves.

University of Southern California

Aug 2016 - May 2017

Masters

Viterbi School of Engineering

Whenever I play a game against bots, I always come to the inevitable decision of which level to play against: Easy, Medium, or Hard. At this point, I feel like I'm directly labelling my skill as a player, and often find that it takes many games before I can find the right bot for me, especially when my skill level is constantly chaning. What if this didn't exist?

AnyBot is a StarCraft II AI experiment that intends to do away with difficulty selection altogether. Instead, players are transported directly into the game to start playing against the bot. As the game progresses, AnyBot gages the player's skill level and falls to meet them silently, ensuring that the game is always challenging, but fun.

For this experiment, we chose to use StarCraft II over StarCraft I (the standard for StarCraft AI) due to the increased relevance of StarCraft II as a consumer game and the ability to distribute this AI via Blizzard's mod community. This has required us to work within the confines of Blizzard's StarCraft II editor and GalaxyScript, which is a C-like scripting language.

AnyBot is now live! Check out the larger writeup on my site by clicking the "AnyBot" link in the title here or in the navigation bar.

Valhalla was my first foray into 3D game development as well as networking games. At its core, Valhalla is a MOBA like League of Legends, where the objective is to get minions to the opponent's base on the other side of the map. However, in a style more like SMITE, we dismissed the idea of a nexus to be destroyed and rather focused on escorting minions into a portal in your enemy's base. In addition, we took a play from SMITE's book in making the gameplay style a First Person Shooter.

However, we didn't stop there. At this point, we have a smite clone with only healing skills, but what about the towers? They always get ignored in MOBAs as obstacles that you have no control over. We decided to flip this and make them your biggest weapon, much like tower defence games. With a single keystroke, the player can enter a top-down perspective of the map in order to select and upgrade their towers.

In this project, I worked with a single classmate to build this using only the First Person Shooter template in Unreal 4 as a starting point. Within a month we had the gameplay mechanics up and running with skills, switching viewports, upgrades, etc. Two weeks later, we were ready for our demo of the one-on-one networking using a client as the host. My role in this primarilly focused on the player - creating the logic for combat and scaling, switching viewports, activating and upgrading skills - and networking across the board.

Uh oh! this section is a little sparse. We're currently under initial stages of development, so we won't have screenshots available for a little bit while we drum up some final edits before we release our first materials! Check back soon for updates!

Spyglass Discovery is devoted to bringing modern principles of immersion, artificial intelligence, and video multimedia to the antiquated methods we still commonly use for discovery. While sites like Google and Yelp have very powerful search engines, they often fall prey to having too much data and, frankly, too much text. This places the burden of discovery on the user, requiring them to search through the massive amount of results and read huge blocks of text to weed out what they are actually looking for, when we often don't know ourselves! Spyglass flips this ideology on its head and places the burden back on the platform to weed out the irrelevant options. In addition, Spyglass learns your preferences and draws connections you didn't even realize existed.

But already, this is too much text! Check out our website for Fraiche, our maiden application for restaurant discovery for more info and updates!

Remember being a hungry college student in the dorms? Midterms and early dining hall hours seemed to always get in the way of your stomach? EnvoyNow comes to the rescue with timely food delivery directly to your room!

EnvoyNow provides a platform for student-to-student food delivery on college campuses around the nation. One might even call it the Uber for food (and much better than Uber Fresh I might add), organizing students for quick and efficient delivery at a minimal cost.

My involvement with this project began in September 2014, when I joined the team of 4 USC students as the lead, and sole, developer. In my first week, I worked with the team to get our alpha version up and running and we launched our first service at USC. It was a resounding success. In the months that ensued, we continued to refine our service on both the logistics and technology fronts, and we expanded into Wisconsin.

Over that winter break, I worked with the team with a complete redesign, which looks much like the current application today, and I used Stripe to implement a full ACH schema for our Envoys to determine their own pay schedule. The company and application is still continuing strong to this day.

WORK EXPERIENCE

VISA, INC.Software Engineer Intern, DMPD

May 2016 - August 2016

I will be returning to my previous team this summer. Check back for more details!

VISA, INC.Software Engineer Intern, DMPD

May 2015 - August 2015

· Designed conceptual payment standards for virtual reality on both Oculus Rift and Google Cardboard platforms
· Designed and built cryptographic schema and proof of concept for secure local data storage on iOS for P2P payments concept

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIATeacher's Assistant

August 2015 - May 2016

· Assisted students in learning concepts of 3D Gameplay Programming through Unreal 4
· Lab assistance and grading for CSCI 380, 3D Game Programming, and CSCI 485, Programming Game Engines

FLUID IT SERVICESSoftware Development Intern

May 2013 - August 2013

· Developed structural analytics skills through analyzing customer workflow while restructuring CRM systems for two clients

PLAY

What do I play?

Come find me on the Rift or on Steam! While a lot of my Play revolves around my ventures and projects, I still jump online to unwind and everything's better with some friends!